After six years in Washington, D.C., as a top housing official in the Obama administration, Carol J. Galante has returned home to the Bay Area. Now on faculty at UC Berkeley, her new charge is the formation of a housing center to serve as laboratory and catalyst for innovations in housing affordability in California and the rest of the nation.

An affordability advocate going back to her undergraduate days at Ohio Wesleyan University, Galante, 61, spent 22 years at BRIDGE Housing, the San Francisco-based nonprofit developer of affordable housing. At the helm of the Federal Housing Administration, she helped manage federal efforts to dig out from the home mortgage crisis — yesterday’s news as runaway real estate prices now squeeze the middle class. Yet she remains an optimist: “You can make a difference,” she tells her students. “Development by development, plan by plan, policy change by policy change, you can have a very positive impact on the outcome for individual families.”

Q: Tell me about the first apartment or house you ever rented. Was it affordable?

A: I was an undergrad in Ohio and it was a ramshackle house with three other roommates, turning the dining room into a living space. I probably paid about $200.

Q: As a budding housing advocate in the 1970s, what was your goal?

A: I came from a very working-class family. My father didn’t graduate from high school, and my family, my grandparents, they were all in the building trades. So I always had a fascination with real estate development. But when I got to undergrad and took that urban geography class, I really got the itch to marry my real estate fascination with something that was good for the world — something that had a positive social impact.

Q: You have three different job titles at UC Berkeley. What does it all add up to?

A: The fundamental goal is to train the next generation — to create a targeted work experience for these students, where they really get their hands dirty and it’s not just about theory and policy.

I’m just finishing up my first semester of teaching U.S. housing policy and now getting together this new housing center that will focus on research and policy-making to make a difference — how people can innovate to get into more affordable housing and how communities can plan and finance that kind of effort.

Q: How do you keep your eye on the prize without getting discouraged?

A: It can be extremely challenging and sometimes feel daunting. There was just a report done by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office showing that California in the 1960s was 30 percent more expensive than the rest of the country. Today it’s two-and-a-half times more expensive than the rest of the U.S.

And the point of the report is that supply makes a difference.

Q: Housing supply? The inventory needs to expand a lot faster?

A: Yes. California is always going to be expensive, especially in the coastal areas. But it could do better if there were a more progressive attitude toward how we foster the residential development that we need. It would bring down the price of housing for the vast middle class. However, that won’t solve the problem for the lowestwage workers. We need dedicated resources to reach that growing population.

Q: Tell me one thing that can be done to make housing more affordable.

A: Right now at the local level, that’s where the land-use control is. If you want to get a project approved, you have to get it through your local planning department. I do think that when communities aren’t meeting their obligations for affordable housing — at some point that local authority needs to be trumped by some kind of state appeals board. This is something that exists in Massachusetts and in Oregon. And as hard as that is to achieve politically, it’s the kind of stick that would make a difference.

This isn’t to say that the state would be approving anything and everything, but you’d have a higher authority that you could go to.

Q: Are you still an idealist?

A: I’m an optimistic person, in general. But I’m a realist in knowing that you have to keep chipping away if you’re going to make change. It’s going to take multiple solutions and a political commitment. And that’s the hardest part, getting the political commitment. Because the fact is that lots of the voters are well-housed. So it is not a high-priority issue for them.

Right? It’s people who are commuting from San Benito County to Santa Clara County and aren’t sure that their cars are going to make it every day — those are the people who have the need. And yet some large portion of the population already has their housing and is doing fine: “I have mine, and I’m not concerned with those who don’t.”

Q: I don’t really understand your optimism.

A: There’s nothing like a boiling-pot crisis. We’re creating five low-wage jobs for every one high-wage job, and it’s not sustainable. And that’s one reason I’m optimistic — people will come to see what’s going on and they’ll get their heads around what needs to be done. In the Bay Area, people are recognizing that our children will not be able to afford to live here unless they happen to be in high tech.

Q: You were at BRIDGE for 22 years, and you directed it for most of that time. What stands out from those years?

A: Going back into disadvantaged neighborhoods to redevelop or rehabilitate old public housing that was troubled physically or operationally. West Oakland is one of the areas where I honestly think it made a very positive impact on the neighborhood’s trajectory. In fact, BRIDGE is now developing a charter school near one of those properties, so the work continues.

Q: And what stands out from your six years in Washington, D.C.?

A: I did a lot of what I think is good work in just making the limited resources and programs work better. But what I’m probably most proud of is that when I took over the helm at FHA, it was in a difficult situation because it had taken on financing so many mortgages of people who had gotten into bad mortgages during the run-up to the crisis. And then they got an FHA mortgage and they couldn’t sustain it. Bottom line, the FHA was taking on a lot of losses. I feel that I was able to get control of the situation and actually make policy changes that turned the financial situation of FHA from negative to positive, and at the same time continue doing mortgages for people at the lower end of the income spectrum and for people without perfect credit — helping that first-time homebuyer get a mortgage in a very difficult financial crisis.

Birth date: April 16, 1954Birth place: PhiladelphiaPositions: At the UC Berkeley, Galante is the I. Donald Terner Distinguished Professor in Affordable Housing and Urban Policy; faculty director of the Berkeley Program in Housing and Urban Policy; and co-chair, Policy Advisory Board, Fisher Center of Real Estate and Urban EconomicsPrevious jobs: From 1996-2009, she was CEO of BRIDGE Housing, the San Francisco-based nonprofit developer of affordable housing. Last October, she returned from a lengthy stint at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in Washington, D.C., where she served three years as deputy assistant secretary, followed by three years as assistant secretary for Housing and Federal Housing Commissioner.Education: She graduated in 1976 from Ohio Wesleyan University with an undergraduate degree in political science and urban studies. In 1978, she graduated from UC Berkeley with a master’s degree in city and regional planning.Family: She and her husband, James Roberts, an Oakland attorney, have two grown sons.Residence: Piedmont

5 Facts About Carol J. Galante1. On weekends, she runs around Lake Merritt in downtown Oakland.

2. A competitive swimmer in high school and college, she still swims regularly. When Galante moved to Berkeley for grad school in 1976, she got a job coaching a swim team in Richmond.3. When she and her husband celebrated their 25th anniversary five years ago in Paris, they got into winetasting. Now it’s a favorite activity. 4. She is “not a big cook. My husband does all the cooking,” Galante says.5. She and her husband like to go to concerts, including at the Fox Theater in Oakland, where “we’ve seen all kinds of new eclectic groups where we feel we raise the average age by 30 years. We’ve seen First Aid Kit. And we’ve seen Hozier, the Irish singer. He’s fabulous.”

Richard Scheinin covers residential real estate for the Bay Area News Group. He has written for GQ and Rolling Stone and is the author of Field of Screams: The Dark Underside of America’s National Pastime (W.W. Norton), a history of baseball. During his 25-plus years based at The Mercury News, his work has been submitted for Pulitzer Prizes for reporting on religion, classical music and jazz. He shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Mercury News staff for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. He has profiled hundreds of public figures, from Ike Turner to Tony La Russa.

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